Month: June 2022

Titan Comics will publish new Conan comics starting next year

Titan and Heroic Signatures announce they are teaming up for new comics featuring Conan and other Robert E. Howard characters.

Titan Comics and Heroic Signatures have announced that Titan will publish comics featuring Conan the Barbarian and other Robert E. Howard characters starting next year.

Titan and Heroic plan to launch a new Conan the Barbarian ongoing series in May of 2023, along with miniseries featuring “Robert E. Howard’s rich tapestry of iconic heroes.” The deal also includes the Conan omnibus program that Marvel was publishing.

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Smash Pages Q&A | ‘The Woman in the Woods’ interview

The editors of the latest ‘Cautionary Fables and Fairy Tales’ book discuss how the project came together and how the stories were chosen for the anthology.

Iron Circus has been publishing the Cautionary Fables and Fairy Tales series, which collects folk tales from around the world and retells them in comics form for younger readers, for the past few years. Under series editors Kel McDonald and Kate Ashwin, the series has managed the incredible feat of being that rare series which contains the work of so many different artists telling stories for younger readers that is visually and stylistically exciting and just fascinating to read. 

The fifth book in the series, The Woman in the Woods and Other North American Stories, takes on the continent of North America, or Turtle Island, as it’s known to many Native and Indigenous communities. To curate the book, they are joined by artist and editor Alina Pete, who drew the book’s cover and drew one of the stories. The three are incredibly busy, but they were kind enough to join me on Zoom recently to talk about the book.

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Can’t Wait for Comics | ‘Black Adam,’ Perry White, ‘Punisher War Journal’ and more

Check out new comic and graphic novel releases this week from Gengoroh Tagame, Jeff Lemire, Jock, Tyler Crook, Mark Waid, Leonard Kirk, Peter David and more.

Welcome to Can’t Wait for Comics, your guide to what comics are arriving in comic book stores, bookstores and on digital. This week brings a new Black Adam series, a Punisher tie-in, a new Tyler Crook series, a new graphic novel from Gengoroh Tagame and more.

I’ve pulled out some of the highlights below, but for the complete list of everything you might find at your local comic shop and on digital this week, you’ll want to check out one or more of the following:

As a reminder, things can change and what you find on the above lists may differ from what’s actually arriving in your local shop. So always check with your comics retailer for the final word on availability.

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R.L. Stine + A.L. Kaplan deliver the ‘Stuff of Nightmares’ at BOOM!

The new miniseries kicks off in September

Goosebumps author R.L. Stine, who has spent decades giving children nightmares through his stories, will turn now to adults in Stuff of Nightmares, a new miniseries coming from BOOM! Studios.

Stine will team up with artist A.L. Kaplan and colorist Roman Titov for his first creator-owned comics series.

“AT LAST I’m free to let my most horrific fantasies out! Hey, kids– stay away from Stuff of Nightmares,” said R.L. Stine. “It’s my first horror comic book work for grownups. Ghastly, gory, and I hope, good stomach-churning fun!” 

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2022 Doug Wright Awards winners announced

Congratulations to this year’s winners.

The Doug Wright Awards, which honor “the best work and most promising talent in Canadian comics,” presented their 2022 awards over the weekend during the Toronto Comic Arts Festival.

This was their first in-person awards ceremony since the beginning of the COVID pandemic in 2020. The event was hosted by film critic Richard Crouse, and featured appearances by Jenn Woodall, David Collier and Dustin Harbin. The outdoor event was also livestreamed, but unfortunately the wind makes the audio very difficult to hear.

Here are the winners:

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Quick Hits | Spider-Man joins the Comic-Con Museum Character Hall of Fame

Plus: News on Danica Novgorodoff, Lucy Knisley, ‘Gender Queer’ and more.

Events | The Comic-Con Museum has announced the latest character to be inducted into their Character Hall of Fame. Spider-Man will join Batman, Pac-Man and Wonder Woman. The induction ceremony will take place on July 20 during Comic-Con International. The museum will also host a Spider-Man exhibit, “Beyond Amazing,” starting on July 1, which will showcase art, costumes and interactive experiences featuring everyone’s favorite web-slinger.

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What Are You Reading? | Thunder Gods + Powerbombs

This week the Smash Pages crew talks about ‘Mighty Thor,’ ‘Batgirls’ and ‘Do A Powerbomb.’

Welcome to What Are You Reading?, our look at what the Smash Pages crew has been checking off their “to read” list lately. Today’s reviews include a good chunk of the Jane Foster issues of Thor, as well as recent issues of Batgirls and Do A Powerbomb.

Let us know what you’ve been reading lately in the comments or on social media.

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Three Count | Jack Teagle, Kaiju Sunset, Omnis Temporalis

Here are three things to buy, to support and to hear in comics today.

1. To Buy: 100% Unofficial Simpsons Comix

“Illustrator and painter Jack Teagle works from an old shipping container he converted into a studio on his parent’s farm in Southwest England.” That’s the opening to a great interview with Teagle that appeared on Threadless.com (yes, the T-shirt website) that I first saw on LinkedIn, of all places, the other day. Threadless and LinkedIn! What is even happening here?

Anyway, in that interview Teagle talks about a fun side project he and several other artist friends had a few years back, the Simpsons Drawing Club, where they would draw zany pictures and comics featuring Simpsons characters. They stopped posting art to their Tumblr in 2020, but Teagle has collected some of his comics from the project into a 52-page collection titled 100% Unofficial Simpsons Comix.

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Bunn + Luckert + Leiz flip for horror in ‘Shock Shop’

The new horror anthology arrives in September.

Dark Horse will publish a new “flip book” horror anthology that features stories by Cullen Bunn, Danny Luckert, Leila Leiz and more starting in September.

Each issue of the four-issue miniseries will feature two stories, as well as variant covers by Francesco Francavilla, Fábio Moon, Caitlin Yarsky, James Stokoe, James Harren and Tonci Zonjic.

Shock Shop will be set in a comic shop with “a twisted retailer filled with tales of terror,” in the tradition of Creepshow, Tales from the Crypt and other horror anthologies with a spooky host. Bunn said it will feature “horror yarns and celebration of horror” on Twitter. Bunn previously worked with Luckert on Regression from Image Comics, and with Leiz on The Last Book You’ll Ever Read from Vault Comics.

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Dark Horse will collect Justin Madson’s ‘Breathers’

The nine-issue series originally published by It’s Alive! lives again next year.

Dark Horse Comics will collect Tin Man creator Justin Madson‘s nine-issue series Breathers into a trade paperback next year. The series is currently published by Drew Ford’s It’s Alive! Press, which is crowdfunding the seventh issue now.

“Long before the word ‘pandemic’ became a part of our daily conversation, I started work on Breathers, a story set in a world where the air was deadly to breathe, so everyone had to wear gas masks when they went outside,” Madson said. “Wearing these ‘breathers’ was an accepted part of life since, really, there was no other option. It seemed like a bit of a far-fetched idea at the time, but, as recent years have shown, I was not too far off. I am thrilled to be working with It’S Alive! and Dark Horse to bring my dystopian tale, Breathers, to a wider audience.”

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A new ‘Midnight Suns’ title rises at Marvel

Blade, Magik, Nico Minoru and more come together in September.

Marvel has announced that a 1990s team — with a slight name change and a different roster — will return in September. Midnight Suns by writer Ethan Sacks and artist Luigi Zagaria almost shares a name with the classic Ghost Rider-led team Midnight Sons, but does share its name with the upcoming Midnight Suns video game that Marvel and 2K will release later this year.

The new team will feature several classic and new mystical heroes, including Magik, Blade, Kushala the Spirit Rider, Nico Minoru and Zoe Laveau from Strange Academy. Oh, and my favorite mystical Marvel character, Wolverine. (It used to be that Wolverine would pretty much pop up in every Marvel comic at some point, so it’s kind of funny and appropriate to see him here).

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Quick Hits | Danica Novgorodoff receives the Yoto Kate Greenaway medal

Plus: ‘Duckman’ creator Everett Peck passes away, and news on ‘The Dark Knight Returns,’ Grant Morrison and more.

Awards | Danica Novgorodoff has received the Yoto Kate Greenaway medal — “the UK’s longest running and best-loved book awards for children and young people” — for her graphic novel adaptation of Jason Reynolds’ novel Long Way Down. According to the press release, it’s the first time since 1973 that a graphic novel has received the prize. The book features hundreds of “stunning” watercolors depicting the decision that 15-year-old Will must make when his brother is shot.

“Long Way Down is a book that asks us to empathise with a character who is planning to harm another person, and endanger his own life, out of grief and revenge,” Novgorodoff said in a statement. “He’s in a complicated, difficult situation, and he needs to make a very hard decision. Through the illustrations, I wanted to show this emotional torment, to make his internal feelings come alive on the page. The book doesn’t preach, but it asks readers, ‘What do you feel, and what would you do?'”

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